Carol Jenkins - Black Titan: A.G. Gaston and the Making of a Black American Millionaire

Recounts the fascinating tale of one who rose from the iron mines of Birmingham to become Alabama's first black millionaire with striking candor.

Black Issues Book Review

I had the pleasure of knowing A. G. Gaston, a remarkable trail-blazer in his time. At last he is receiving the tribute he deserves. His niece, Carol Jenkins, and his grand niece, Elizabeth Hines, have captured him perfectly in this warm, wise, and inspiring biography

V ERNON E. J ORDAN ,
former president of the National Urban League,
senior managing director of Lazar Freres, LLC

A vividly told account.

The Roanoke Times

It was my privilege to meet A. G. Gaston in Birmingham, Alabama, during the early 1970s. I was greatly inspired by his unique entrepreneurial vision and passionate belief in economic self-sufficiency. Utilizing instinctive business and organizational skills, he built a network of businesses to meet the needs of underserved African American communities in the American South. His business philosophy and example should be the prototype for people starting in business today: filling the needs of people. This book should be read by every entrepreneur.

Byron Lewis, chairman of Uniworld Group

Black Titan is a biography of one man and his wife, but also a look at what life was like for African Americans for an entire century.

Jacksonville Free Press

I served on the Board of Tuskegee University with A. G. Gaston and saw up close his willingness to share his unrivaled expertise with anyone who asked. Even though he succeeded with only a tenth-grade education, he was a believer in formal education and much of his philanthropy was directed to create opportunities for young people. His life story should be required reading for themand the rest of us.

E D L EWIS ,
cofounder, publisher, and CEO of Essence Communications

Lovingly written.

Star Tribune

During the civil rights years, A. G. Gaston's business success put him in the unique position of being an effective negotiator. His behind-the-scenes political contributions have not been appreciated until now. This book is about a life in business, but also about leadership. Gaston shows us how wealth can be used to benefit the powerless.

D AVID D INKINS ,
former mayor of the city of New York

Jenkins and Hines have written a fascinating book that will inspire entrepreneurs and business leaders. Black Titan is not just a family story; it is also a great biography with important business lessons.

P AMELA T HOMAS -G RAHAM ,
president and CEO of CNBC

The man lying in the hospital bed before me resembled a carving of a wise African elder, the kind of statue you might see perched atop a rickety roadside table in a dusty Caribbean village. His skin, dark as mahogany and just as smooth, was pulled taut over his carefully delineated features; his wiry body, solid and strong despite the passing years. That he was nearly a hundred years old seemed improbable to me. True, his always close-cropped hair had by now turned entirely white. But his eyes still told you that he understood everything you'd said, and what you meant.

Here was the man who had created ten major companies well before anyone thought a black man capable of the job. Here was a man who had amassed considerable wealth at a time when the words black and wealth still felt antithetical. A man who had been a central force in the civil rights movement, who had made it into the history books. A man who would live to be 103 years old, despite this bump in his otherwise healthy life.

That we were in a hospital room on his account seemed more a minor adjustment to the tenor of his daily life than the result of a life-threatening illness. This was so not because we did not care about his well-being, but precisely because he made it seem as if nothing at all had changed. The man about to have part of his diabetes-compromised leg removed gave no sign whatsoever of the impending alteration. Instead, characteristic of nearly a century of methodical accomplishment, he was rooted in the present. And at that particular moment his niece from New York had arrived to pay a visit. As his wife of fifty years, Minnie, fussed about him, inquiring of his comfort, he leaned closer to me (the visiting niece), giving an indication that he wanted to say something important, something serious. You know what our people need now, Carol Ann? Their own stock market. I just wish I were ten years younger. Yes, that's what we need now. Hours later, in the recovery unit, he returned to the same discussion of investing and securities, with no mention of his own, very personal loss that day.

My uncle, A. G. Gaston, was the real thing if you wanted to use words like legend or icon. Beginning with the question What do our people need now? Uncle Arthur (as we called him) developed, over the course of his nearly eighty-year career, an amazingly accurate business philosophy that allowed him to create and grow numerous service-based companies for the black community in Birmingham, Alabama. By 1992 Black Enterprise (the magazine devoted to tracking the progress of African American businesses and their creators) had designated A. G. Gaston the Entrepreneur of the Century. I doubt there were many entrepreneurswhite or blackwho could rival the span (seventy-three years) or the expanse (banking, insurance, motel, restaurant, real estate, construction, funeral homes and cemeteries, radio stations, senior housing, and a business college) of his empire.

For many years A. G. Gaston was referred to casually as the richest black man in America. We, his family, never knew if that was actually true, but we did know for certain that he was very good at what he did, and that he went to work every day of his life until the day he died. At his death, news accounts would put the combined worth of his companies as high as $140,000,000.

None of us really understood, as our uncle's life and legend were unfolding, how accurately his story reflected a century of hopes on the part of African Americans: initiated by the promise of the Civil War, trampled by the failures of the Reconstruction era, to finally become possible a hundred years later. The sweep of his life was nothing other than majestic: from grandparents who were former slaves, to the civil rights riots on the street just outside his office window, A. G. Gaston had seen it all. Not only had he seen it, but he had done itand in unparalleled company. Over the course of his life Gaston had worked alongside two giants of this century, both considered saviors of the race: Booker T. Washington and Martin Luther King Jr.

Bracketed between these two men of national and world renown, A. G. Gaston played his part on a smaller stage, in the Birmingham he loved and refused to abandon. He often shared that stage with the more brilliant lights passing through, but his legacy, to all who knew and knew of him, offered just as powerful a message as those spelled out by Washington and King.